pubcop

Verifies common oversights and mistakes during publishing automatically so you can publish with confidence. Includes the following built-in checks. Each check can be configured and turned on or off:

• Tag - Make sure that prerelease versions (e.g. 1.2.3-beta.0) are published with the appropriate tag and that standard versions (e.g. 1.2.3) are published with one of the configured standard release tags.

• Branch - Require standard releases to be made from one or more predefined release branches. Prevents people from accidentally publishing a standard release from a feature branch that may not have all of the latest changes.

• Changelog - Ensure that an entry is present in the package changelog when publishing standard releases. This makes sure that the changelog is kept in sync with the published versions of the package in situations where automated changelog generation is not used.

Usage

Install pubcop in your package by running:

npm install --save-dev pubcop

Then, add pubcop to the scripts section of your package.json file under the prepublishOnly command. If using npm 3 or below, you can use the prepublish command instead (additional context).

{
  "scripts": {
    "prepublishOnly": "pubcop"
  }
}

Now when you run npm publish, pubcop will automatically perform the requested checks and prevent you from publishing if any of them fail.

API

Pubcop can perform several checks on publish for you. All are on by default, but you can configure it to turn off or modify the behavior of any of the commmands. All of the options below can be mixed and matched to suit your needs.

Select Specific Validations

By default, pubcop will run all available checks on publish. You can specify one or more specific checks to run using the --checks option to the pubcop command. Valid values are tag branch and changelog (or all to enable all checks).

The example below enables only the tag and branch validations, skipping the changelog check.

{
  "scripts": {
    "prepublishOnly": "pubcop --checks tag branch"
  }
}

Configuring Validations

Tag

The tag validation will force standard versions to use the latest tag by default and force prerelease versions to use the tag corresponding to the first prerelease identifier in the version. Here are some examples of valid tag and version combinations with the default configuration.

Version	Tag
1.0.0	latest (or none)
1.0.0-beta.0	beta
1.0.0-first.second.1	first
1.0.0-dev+sha123	dev

The behavior of prerelease versions (e.g. 1.0.0-beta.0) is not currently configurable, but you may specify other tags that should be associated with standard versions using the --standard-tags option. The most common use case is to allow standard releases to be published under the next tag in addition to the latest tag.

To allow publishing of standard versions to both the latest and next tags, you can set the following:

{
  "scripts": {
    "prepublishOnly": "pubcop --standard-tags latest next"
  }
}

Branch

The branch validation prevents standard releases from being published from git branches other than the main release branch(es). By default, it requires that all standard releases be published from the master git branch. You can customize the list of standard release branches with the --branch-name option.

The following will allow standard releases to be published from either the master or dev branches:

{
  "scripts": {
    "prepublishOnly": "pubcop --branch-name master dev"
  }
}

Changelog

The changelog validation prevents standard releases from being published without an entry present in the package's changelog. This helps keep the documentation in sync with the project and eases upgrade pains for consumers of the package. The changelog validation looks for a CHANGELOG.md file in the root of the package by default, but this can be changed with the --changelog-path option.

If you wanted to change the changelog validation to look for a changelog in your docs folder, you would set the following:

{
  "scripts": {
    "prepublishOnly": "pubcop --changelog-path docs/CHANGELOG.md"
  }
}

Motivation

Tools like semantic-release provide a great way to automate aspects of package publishing, but make requirements on development workflow and package structure that are not for everyone. This tool allows people to have confidence in their publishing process without having to change their process or remember to use a different command to publish. Just call npm publish and pubcop takes care of the rest.